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Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Wild Beasts

I've got a lot of stuff going up this week...here's a review of the very flamboyant, very beautiful third album from Wild Beasts. It's called Smother and, like about 200 other records, it came out on Tuesday.

Wild BeastsSmother(Domino)

www.dominorecordco.com

Hayden Thorpe's falsetto flutters like a hummingbird, swoops and curls like a multi-colored kite in the wind. He is, if anything, more flamboyant and florid than ever on this, the Wild Beasts' third album, yet because he is working against a more meticulously plotted background, his vocal pyrotechnics seem less shocking, more fitting this time. Smother continues in the Mercury Nominated Two Dancers (2009) path of more disciplined theatricality, finding a way for Thorpe's wild fantasias to work as artistry rather than oddity.